Practical Cognition :: essays research papers

Practical CognitionTheories of Knowledge (Karl Marx)In his early eld of writing, Karl Marxs ideas were similar to Ameri open firePragmatism, especially his ideas about epistemology. He defines equity in apragmatic fashion and explains cognition in terms of unimaginative needs of thehu military man being. While some of his ideas were not followed to their logicalconclusion, nor make sense, the fundamentals of his epistemology containvaluable ideas which can be viewed as furthering reality as a respectablephilosophy. His theory of cognition states that cognition is a biologicalfunction of the human which is used as a prick for his survival.Marx defines truth in a pragmatic way. The truth value of a judgement is due tothe usefulness of accepting or rejecting the judgement. A instruction is true ifaccepting it makes a positive difference or has a helpful influence and it isfalse if accepting it causes difficulty or dissatis positionion. The gist of astatement is the practical res ult of accepting the statement. In general, then,the truth or falsity of a statement is relative, not only(prenominal) to the item-by-itemaccepting or rejecting the statement, but also to the circumstances in whichthat soul finds himself. Truth is relative, but Marx is not an extremerelativist (no one to be taken seriously is) because there is a constraint tohow relative the truth can be Humans are making the truth judgements, andhumans fetch a common element, viz . their needs, which do not vary greatlybetween people.Humans are in contact with nature at a fundamental level. The humanunderstanding of nature is a consequence of the fact that nature confrontshumans when they try to fulfill their needs. This is the case with any organism,and to each one species reacts according to the tools of that species. One of the humantools is the intellect, and it works through the cognition of the intelligence ofelements of nature. Cognition occurs as the organizing of sensory data intoca tegories. Without the ability to make generalizations, man would not be ableto think. Moreover, the human capacity to think is merely the same as makingabstractions about experience. There is nothing more(prenominal) to descriptions of theworld than those abstractions. Details about the world are described only interms of generalizations, for if there were a word for a particularized accompaniment uniqueto only one event, then that word would be nothing but a name -an abbreviationfor the term, the specific detail x , unique to only this one event, y .The assimilation of the out-of-door world, which is at first